Stephen Foster was an American songwriter from Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, active from the early 1840s until his death in 1864, who wrote in the parlour, minstrel and popular song traditions. His songs blended European parlour conventions with vernacular American and minstrel styles, were widely published and commonly performed in parlour settings and minstrel shows, and later entered nineteenth-century American folk repertoires associated with antebellum and postbellum cultural contexts.
